Surely we can all agree on what ‘straight’ means
With six weeks to go until the start of the Premiership season, it has been announced that some Law amendments will come into force on August 1. The wheels of World Rugby grind exceedingly slow, and after specific international trials, we now move into a global trial, with a full year to assess the amendments’ impact before the moratorium in fiddling with the Laws comes into place, twelve months before the next RWC.
There must have been more column inches written about crooked scrum feeds than any other aspect of the game, and more fans must have huffed and puffed, and spluttered into their beer on this seemingly simple issue. I’ve never met anyone who was a supporter of feeding the ball straight into the second row, or anyone who could understand what was so damned difficult about addressing the issue – how hard could it be?
For the past couple of seasons we’ve had the total nonsense whereby if any part of the ball, even 1mm if the ref ’s eyesight was good enough to meas ure that, touched the centre line of the tunnel, then it was deemed to be straight. It seemed as though administrators and officials had simply given up on the problem, and it was less and less talked about – the feeling seemed to be growing that nothing would be done about it, but now it looks as though they’re having another go.
As always with rugby’s Laws, the devil is in the detail, and it’s still unclear whether the latest amendment truly is the answer. The wording says that the scrum-half must throw the ball in straight, but what does that mean? If it means that the mid-point of the ball has to travel along the centre line of the tunnel, then whoopee, the problem is fixed, but I doubt that is what will happen. Scrum-halves are nasty little men who will always be looking to take advantage of any loophole they can find, and if they can get away with any variation on mid-point/ centre line, then that’s what they’ll do.
The amendment possibly gives them a clue when is says that it’s OK for the 9 to stand up to a shoulder width towards their own side of the scrum – in other words, the scrumhalf doesn’t need to line up with the centre point of the tunnel, which surely makes it more difficult to feed the ball in such a way that you or I, or the famous man on the Clapham omnibus, would consider to be straight?
The other thing we don’t yet know is what guidance will be given to referees, and whether we’ll once again be subject to that most insidious of rugby words, ‘interpretation’. I’ve never understood what’s wrong with simply applying the letter of the Laws, and why we need to allow different referees, in different parts of the rugby world, to come up with their own views on what, for example, ‘straight’ means. Even more than any deficiencies in the Laws, it’s this that is at the heart of many of rugby’s problems.
We saw it on the Lions tour when northern and southern hemisphere referees seemingly had differing views on the scrum and the breakdown, and we see it every weekend on television when the PRO12 and the Premiership seem to have very different views on what constitutes crossing, and what are legitimate running lines. Premiership fans watching a PRO12 game are likely to shout ‘crossing’ about as often as Jiffy screams ‘numbers’, and vice versa, PRO12 fans are mystified when what they see as being acceptable every weekend suddenly gets pinged by a Premiership ref ’.
Head to the southern hemisphere and we have the same nonsense with forward passes. We all know what constitutes a forward pass – it’s when the ball obviously travels forward – but we’re still being subject to all of the nonsense about the direction of travel of the hands, and if you watch Super Rugby then players get away with murder, throwing passes of which an NFL quarter-back would be proud!
I refuse to believe that feeding the ball ‘straight’ is a difficult concept to police, but I reckon that this issue is far from over. You know what it means, as do I, and all we want is to see referees singing off the same hymnsheet, but I’ll bet this time next year we’re still talking about it!